Hands On With Borderlands Co-Op

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This week we’ve had a chance to play through the beginning of Borderlands, courtesy of 2K Games. What follows are some preview impressions of that co-op experience. We expect to unleash a full RPS Verdict on the game later this month.

Playing the single-player version of Borderlands causes one single game feature to stand out. When you are reduced to zero health you have some time in which you bleed to death. This gives you a chance to revive yourself with a “second wind” by getting a kill. In the co-op part of the game this makes perfect sense, as it’s also an opportunity for your buddies to run over to you and help you up. In the single player game, however, there are times when there is nothing to kill, and no buddy to help you. You simply kneel there, bleeding to death. And it’s kind of heart-breaking.

This feature alone, I feel, demonstrates how Borderlands is meant to played with friends. Once router port-fiddling is defeated that’s easily done online by making your normal game an internet game, playing your own campaign, and then inviting chums when they’re available. We’ve had a chance to do that, and we’ve just finished the opening section of the game known as “Arid Badlands”, by playing through as a team.

Arid Badlands very much an introductory experience, with the chirpy robot character and a mysterious static woman explaining everything after you pass the character selection screen. You’re asked to help out a ramshackle frontier town which is sparsely populated by redneck characters. You’re a treasure hunter, looking for a mythical vault, and lots of people seem invested in your finding it. Arriving via an armoured bus, you kill some bandits off and starting settling in. Once you open up the main hub town, Fyrestone, then it feels a little like the opening stages of an MMO. There’s a strong whiff of those starter area cues you get in games that are longer-term and slower-paced than traditional shooters.

There’s not much “worldiness” to it, with only a handful of friendly and rather characterless NPCs. In fact, from what we’ve seen there’s little general activity in the world, but there’s nevertheless some evidence of more complex infrastructure: wind-turbines, powerlines, and a neat vehicle system. All this bodes well for the rest of the game, which should hopefully expand on the idea of Pandora as a world. Although there’s constant combat from the start, Fyrestone and the surrounding area feels low key and preparatory, and once early missions unfold then that air of RPG is even stronger. The back and forth of minor quests, the mission dispensing characters and bulletin boards, the hit numbers bouncing from enemies, the stats and colours for weapon types – I almost expected the badlands to open up and reveal some kind of “World Of Guncraft” beyond.

And yet the best fun we’ve had in the first part of the game has been thanks to the focus on gunplay. Borderlands is embedded deeply in the shooter category, and it will send you running for cover and aiming for headshots. Some of the fights we’ve had have been ludicrous tooth-and-nail running battles, with a joyous chaos to them. In this opening area there are two main kinds of enemies: skags, a kind of mutant dog-lizard thing, and bandits, who come in various shapes and sizes of mean and mutated. Playing co-op hugely amplifies the chaos of a firefight because so many more high level enemies appear. You’re often dealing with multiple targets and trying to drag your friends to their feet while you yourself are under fire, as rabid midgets stab axes into you, and heavies hammer you with machinegun fire.

All this this drives the loot-hunger, of course, because co-op battles bring about more impressive enemies, and therefore even better drops. With millions of weapons, various shields and other mods to play with, there’s a whole load of tweaking to be done to your character, and swapping loot back and forth is going to become routine among friends. I suspect, however, it’s going to trickier to play with strangers: there’s currently no formal system for loot sharing, meaning anyone can run in and grab whatever they like from the hundreds of stashes that you uncover. A limited inventory space, however, means that the greedy run out of room rather promptly.

I’m coming to love the art style and general attitude of the game. The hand-drawn textures give the game a look that is clean and crisp while still being down and dirty. It’s comic book and playful, with a bold sense of thrills, and a good feeling for why we enjoy getting an even bigger gun. While Arid Badlands is a brownish desert it nevertheless has a bunch of interesting design going on in it, not just in the visuals, but in way the sidequests and the main story arc interlock. It’s structured so that you have plenty of opportunity to back off and level up a bit before taking on more serious tasks.

Having taken down the early bosses and fought our way through what I suppose constitute the first “dungeons” in the game, we’re certainly interested in seeing what comes next. And for that, you’ll have to wait for our next article.

178 Comments

Does the world scale to player number or… how does that work? If I’m playing with 2 people, how is the game different than if I’m playing with 4? Also, would I be totally wasting my money if I expected to usually be playing solo?

Does the player have skills and stats? To be honest, any game that lets me fool around with ridiculous guns is a no-brainer purchase for me, but from what I’ve seen, it’s more of a traditional FPS as opposed to an action RPG game, I’m probably wrong though.

Admittedly, HG:L failed hard, but there were quite a few very good ideas in there that I hope surface in other games, the loot system, for example, it seems silly for games not to implement a similar system that worked so well.

Jacques: It’s got skills you improve by use and also ability skill trees. Hellgate was a diablo-clone-maker decides to make an FPS. Borderlands is a FPS-maker decides to make a diablo-clone. I’ll probably have a lot more to say on that point in the verdict.

Jacques: Worth stressing – it’s not quite as RPGy as Hellgate, but being first-person, the sense of control matters more – which is where I think the FPS experience pays off. That said, each of the four characters, does have 3 (smallish) trees to advance down, which would lead to quite different builds. It’s pretty nifty stuff.

I always thought that Hellgate would have been a much better game if they’d just held off and released it six months later. The enormo-megapatch (it was a couple of gigs worth of content) they released just before the game died for good was rather impressive, and brought in a lot of content and features, as well as improving graphics and rebalancing a ton of stuff.

They rushed it, and it sank them. Here’s hoping that Borderlands can get the formula right, because it’s a really good idea in general.

Jim Rossignol said:
There’s more badguys, and more tough badguys, and more loot, for each person that joins.

John will argue the case for single player, I think, he’s got more of a kick out of that than co-op. I’ve enjoyed the multiplayer best.

So it's: "player has joined our world, Diablo's minions grow stronger, and er, more numerous too"

I find I can get just as much out of the single player of these types of games. In fact I usually like to get through at least a good portion of them in SP before diving in with other people as you tend to get whisked along as the blood-lust increases by way of being in a group!

Duel: basically the guns start out okay and just get more insane. What we perhaps haven’t got across is that you’ve got guns everywhere. Hundreds of them. It’s the super-powered few that you’ll pick up and use all the time. And they tend to have mad powers like super-fast reload, or setting people on fire, or immense single-shot damage, or whatever.

Pignoli: precisely. I have been playing single-player too, but when someone comes online I want to play with them because the fights are more hectic.

@vicepresidentisamilf
Obvious troll is so obvious I can see it in my current swineflu addled state of mind
I’m very very excited about this game, and I can’t see how its even comperable to MW2, it’s like comparing Braid to Bionic Commando Rearmed.

Wow, I’ve never seen such a series of wrong assertions bundled together like that, bravo sir.
First off, asking why anyone would want to play this when MW2 is on the way is like asking why anyone would buy Scibblenauts with Dragonage on the way, they’re very different games with totally different appeals.
Secondly, you do realise Wind Waker didn’t invent cell shading, right? And even if it had, Borderlands would be no more stealing from it than it steals from Jet Set Radio. And as for ’stealing’ from Halo, I am uncertain what mechanic you seem to beleive bungee have patented, co-op? Or perhaps the first person shooter itself?
Lastly, if you are going to lazily label a game ‘x with y’ at least do it accurately. Hell the phrase ‘Diablo with guns’ is used by nearly every preview of this game. Oh, and ‘who wants to play zelda with guns?’ Metroid fans, I suppose.
Lastly, if your point really is 'why play x interesting, innovative game when y big blockbuster is round the corner', boy are you on the wrong site.

Gamespy? Really? The last multiplayer game I played featuring Gamespy was Medieval 2: Total War. Trying to organise a game in that was awful. You randomly couldn’t see some people based on their country and getting two people into a game took at least half an hour of trying. The only sensible option was Hamachi. Does Borderlands allow for direct connect or LAN games?

Peer to peer? Well bugger. It’s going to be the same problem as demigod; a cool-looking multiplayer game that I can’t play due to university internet restrictions. Sigh, and I was looking forward to it too.

From the second gameplay pic: “Piss Wash Jumped”? o_O
The comments about lack of “worldliness” make me a tad wary – it seems like the perfect game for a strong cast of NPC characters wisecracking and interacting with the world and player.
However, it looks absolutely lovely, and fun co-op always pricks my ears up. And I don’t think I’ve played an FPS co-op game with loot drops before.
I’m fairly certain I’ll pick this up, definitely looking forward to more impressions on the game.

Forgive me as I’m up to my eyes in the development of my own game and have but a bare few minutes of allotted time each day to catchup on general gamey-news, but IS this an MMO, or is it a single player game, with coop? If the latter, my wife and I may need to check this out, as we do enjoy our coop goodness, oh yes we do. :)

I’d personally love to hear more about what it’s like playing with complete strangers. I have no Pc friends. None. Zip. Nada. Sounds like the lack of loot sharing support amongst strangers could be a patch job. I suspect you guys are using some kind of team-speak app. But is there chat available? How does it compare to, say, going on a raid with strangers in WoW?

I mean, not me, I don’t really like people, except for the members of my clan, who don’t seem to like computer games (I don’t get it either). But you’re in the right place, I’m sure you could find some people here to steal loot from. There’s a steam group as well.

Sounds good, and seeing how I loved HG:L, this is most likely a day-one purchase for me. However, I’ll terribly miss proper armour. I can kind of understand why they left it out, this being a first-person shooter, but an optional 3rd person view and different armour would have pushed this far higher into the hype stratosphere for me.

I am a bit dissapointed it feels like an MMO according to this article. I was hoping the open worldidness would be evident from the start and you could just get on with exploring rather than doing little inconsequential quests.
It sounds fun though, ill pick it up when i have the cash.

Is this the only way to play co-op by portforwarding the router? I can never get this to work without loosing my internet. I followed all the steps on portforwarding.com and just can’t get it to work. I hope there is dedicated servers like left 4 dead.

My real life friends have move to table top RPG, so I will probably try to do like in L4D, build a list of cool people with the friends system of Steam. This means that for half a year, I will probably PUG a lot. In a sense, I love Pug-ing. Is like another random element on a game. The game feel more varied with random people. On the other side, the loot is somewhat PUG unfriendly, as described here. Oh well..

After a lot of “Killing Floor”, It seems that I like the “sniper-o-matic” type of character. I like to pick mobs, one by one, in a letal way. But a bit of spray-and-pray is always fun. Is all about how the weapons will feel. And If theres something like “Spider Mines”, since PETS > ALL.

But you have to open ports on the router, that run some unknom “real time os” you have never eard of (or maybe a linux port). And probably protocols like upnp are not popular.

I don’t know why seems so easy on Xbox, I have never played one. I suppose the servers of XBox runs some discovery service, or something, so is not true p2p,.. if you are firewalled, the XBox servers redirect all the server trafic to you. Or something.

The real problem is USA. USA has almost all IPv4 adddress, so see no reason to invest time and energy to migrate to IPv6. The rest of the world need IPv6, but also need USA to migrate. So we don’t have IPv6. With IPv6, It would be easy to have a real internet IP for every machine on your house. So this shit “NAT” that routers do, will not bee needed. It seems that NAT is a horrible hack, that barelly works, so network games have to jump lots of problems and broken implementations to run.

IPv6 will spread all over the world as the hard- and software mature to support it. It is as of now a very young technology.

UPNP is unpopular because it is quite a security risk (applications opening ports in my firewall as they please? No thanks.)

NAT is not some “hack” – it has been around for ages and works very well, no matter if you’re one person playing behind a tiny home router or 100’s of people playing behind a corporate firewall. Port Address Translation is a bit more iffy but is not used as often.

(Not in reply to Tei but since the comment system now is crap I can’t see the poster I wanted to reply to:) What does it matter if you can’t run more than one 360 game at once? How do you play more than 2 PC games at the same time on the same machine in a peer-to-peer situation?

The problems with a firewall and NAT/PAT only shows up if you’re hosting a game where you need to publish a service (the game) outside the firewall but this isn’t a limitation of NAT but of how TCP/IP works; one port at one address equals one service.

If you’re trying to do this for standarized ports (i.e. not using peer to peer as you have multiple servers serving up different services) then it won’t work unless you happen to have enough IP-adresses for every game (not cheap). This is why there are different default ports for different games.

Good game servers allow you to set your own ports though so if you’re hosting a game behind a firewall you should be able to open up just one port and tell the game and your friends to use that one.

Ok, way too tired to go into more depth about this but these are the basics.

Must admit, this has long been a preorder for me, but on the xbox (sacrilege!), mostly because of the split-screen co-op and ease of matchmaking. Why they can’t implement either of those things in a pc game beats me really… think co-op sounds brilliant, me and my wife will have a great time looting the world….

I’m interested in the actual game but peer to peer co-op and Gamespy are both a bit of a worry for me. Peer to peer is designed for console users with 21st century broadband, and doesn’t work as well on the PC, or in Australia where many people (myself included) are still downloading like it’s 1999 (i.e. slowly). As for Gamespy, well it’s like this middleware that doesn’t work, but keeps being used in big games – UT3 and BF2 for example – where it causes big headaches.

Well they are hardly silly prices, and I have honestly only found the game at the cheapest price of £29.99.

I feel your missing the actual point of my post, which is to say that Borderlands is greatly cheaper then Modern Warfare on many sites.

It was merely linking to the idea of how people are looking for a cheaper game, which longer play time then a more expensive game.
I personally was made redundant recently, so I can’t afford to spend too much on a game. So for me, and I’m sure for others, spending £20 on a game that will offer far more playability then a more expensive game is just smart thinking.

Ah okay, well I retract my previous statements, I’m quite loyal to only a few shops (mainly Game as I can get lovely lovely points!)
But I still stand by my opinion that price will be a big factor in how many people are interested in this product.

I think I’ll be waiting to see more stuff from a single-player point of view as I’m not sure who I know that’ll be getting this.

Unless of course I try and join in with RPS folks.

If I jump into somebody else’s game how much of my stuff is carried across? I assume I’ll have my gear but does it also carry over what quests have been completed and that sort of thing? I mean, if I’ve beaten Quests A, B, C and D in single-player and then hook up with somebody else who is just about to do quests D and E, do I do quest D again? If I help them with quest E will I then have completed quest E if/when I go back to single-player?

I’ve not articulated that question very well at all so hopefully my meaning comes over okay. :-P

Jim and Kieron, i got a question for you lot concerning the xp distribution. Havent found infos on that yet.

When you play with other people, are the xp distributed evenly or is it every man for himself? This kinda makes or breaks coop games for me since im playing games with the same friends for years now and it kinda spoils the fun if im getting ahead of the pack, which i usually do, the other lads arent gamers as long as i am.

Thanks for making my day Kieron. Now its back to staring at that “not yet released” on my Steam Games Tab. Been looking for this game for so long now, and the only concern i had has now been nullified. Yes!

I have a HUGE question…I read in a few forums the possibility of duel weapons..is that possible in borderlands? Like 2 pistols or even i noticed that the Berserker dude used the rocket launcher with only one hand; kinda makes me wonder if you could have duel launchers!

Quests: the game is at the state the host is in. If you join his game, you are at the stage of the game has got to. If you complete quests with him, they are completed in your game too. I’m not sure if this creates inconsistencies in the experience, we need to check it out.

Loot: whatever you pick up in an online game, you take back to single player on that character.

Gamespy? Really? Shit. I don’t mean to say that this will prevent me purchasing the game, but my experience has been that Gamespy is a pain in the ass and an archaic relic of a service that’s not worth using in this day and age. Amazon’s got it listed as using Games for Windows Live, which I realize many people here don’t like but which has been much less problematic for arranging coop than Gamespy has been, for me. I’d also have taken Steam matchmaking.

It just occured to me that this only makes sense if you have a fixed group of people that you play all your games with like i do. Doesnt help at all of course if you just want to jump into some random game…

I’m extremely likely to only ever play with one particular person, but I can’t imagine setting up and running a fake LAN with Hamachi will be more convenient than futzing with Gamespy. The advantage of GfW Live was that all I had to do was fire up the game, click my friend, click invite, and I was golden.